As
in past years, it is a large page, necessarily, so it may take a bit to
load. Also as in the past, I have rounded off to the nearest hundred comics.

The Top Thousand Comics account for around 54.21 million copies; as we've seen in earlier years, that's well over half of all the comics that Diamond sold.
In 2012 the figure was 53.43 million copies; in 2011, it was 47 million
copies, and in 2010, the
total was 45.3 million copies. So that's at least straight years of
growth in unit sales for the grouping. In full retail
dollars, the Top Thousand Comics sold for $202.02 million, a $10
million increase over last year's total of 191.4 million. (See the 2012
article here and charts here; and read the 2011 article here, and the charts here.)

Notably, almost every single one of the Top 100 comics on the list had a "multiple order codes" notation from Diamond, meaning there were variant covers or reprints combined to make the main entry.
The
Top ThousandGraphic Novels, led by Saga Vol. 1, went for $79.03 million, up
from $71.4 million in 2012 and $58.4 million in 2011. Combined, the Top
Thousand Comics and Top Thousand Graphic Novel lists account for about
54% of the orders by dollars Diamond received in
publishing last year, which was around $518 million. The Top Thousands
accounted for 55% of all dollars retailers spent in 2012.Image'sWalking Dead #115
was the top seller of the year; Comichron estimates that, all told,
around 329,300 copies of the issue, including all variants, were ordered
by Direct Market retailers in North America. That's enough to make it
the fifth highest-selling comic book of the 21st Century, behind only the Obama Amazing Spider-Man #583, with orders of 530,500 copies in 2009, last year's Walking Dead #100, and Civil Warissues #2 and #3. You can see the updated top-sellers by year here.

Twenty-one issues from 2013 made the Top 300
for the 21st Century list, fewer than last year. Ten 2013 issues made the Top 100, and six made the Top 50.

Who published the Top Thousand Comics this year? Here's the breakdown:

Marvel: 498 (-32 from 2012)

DC: 410 (-9 from 2012)

Image: 49 (+18 from 2012)

Dark Horse: 18 (+10 from 2012)

IDW: 15 (+9 from 2012)Aspen: 5 (+5 from 2012)

Boom: 2 (-1 from 2012)

Valiant: 1 (-2 from 2012)

Dynamic Forces (Dynamite):1 (-1 from 2012)Archie: 1 (+1 from 2012)

That's one publishers that wasn't on last year's list: Aspen.

And here's the publisher breakdown of the Top Thousand Graphic Novels. Those with 10 or more entries:

DC: 362 (+21 from 2012)

Marvel: 288 (+4 from 2012)

Image: 96 (+25 from 2012)

Dark Horse: 91 (-3 from 2012)

IDW: 42 (+4 from 2012)

Random House: 17 (-4 from 2012)

Viz: 16 (-24 from 2012)

Boom: 12(+2 from 2012)

That's a big move for DC and Image, with a similar-sized drop in the count of entries from Viz.

Walking Dead
softcovers and hardcovers in the Top Thousand added up to nearly $7.8
million at retail — with comics bringing the total for the line up to
nearly $12 million. That's enough to give it a market share approaching
2.4%, which would make it once again the seventh largest publisher for
the year.

Now, some notes about the shape of the market, as seen on the lists. We find the following breakdowns for unit sales:

NUMBER OF COMIC BOOK ISSUES SELLING AT LEAST THIS MANY COPIES DURING YEAR

200,000+

100,000+

75,000+

50,000+

25,000+

10,000+

2009

2

39

119

379

n.a.

n.a.

2010

0

26

94

303

955

n.a.

2011

3

42

86

343

984

n.a.

2012

5

63

129

403

1100

2250

2013

6

64

178

390

1128

2430

Another
way to look at the above is: where does the 100,000-copy level start on
the chart? In 2010, every book above 39th place sold that many copies
or more; in 2013, six-figures started at 64th place.

As
you can see, the upper tier, above 100,000 copies, was basically
unchanged from 2012 to 2013. But nearly 50 more titles sold above 75,000
copies in 2013 than in 2012. The middle to lower tiers were more
stable, but it appears that quite a few more issues broke the
10,000-copy level.

Repeating the end-of-year report, the comic shop market in North America ordered nearly $518 million worth of comics and graphic novels in 2013, an increase of 9% over 2012. The final end-of-year report, bringing in outside channels, will appear later this winter. (And no, there is no source for digital sales, although they appeared in 2012 to be about 10% of print sales in dollar terms, based on industry reports.) Diamond also reported in September that the number of comics accounts it sells to increased 4% to 2,638 from September 2012.

Origin II #1
was the top-selling comic book of the month; at 131,700 copies, it
almost exactly matches first-month sales of Origin #2 from 2001. Not one
of the bigger blockbusters for the year, it'll likely still make the
Top 300 for the 21st Century list.

December is always a
hard month to compare across time because of the variable shipping
schedules caused by the holidays. This December, for example, had only
four Wednesdays—but five New Comics Days, because retailers were given a Tuesday release date for the New Year's Eve shipment. On the other hand, the Christmas Eve shipment was tiny (including only Origins II #1, a book of mine, and 11 other items), so it works out to four weeks of new release volume. Given
some retailers' holiday schedules and UPS's problems at the end of the
year, it's probably a four-week month for sales purposes, too.

Something
else was noteworthy. The Top 300 Graphic Novels category vaulted
over the $10 million mark — it had never topped $9 million before — but
the result should not be taken at face value. Or, rather, at full retail
value. There was a lot of holiday-season (or end-of-fiscal-year
clearance) graphic novel discounting going on this month: more than $3
million in sales came from older Omnibus hardcovers from Marvel which
were steeply discounted. We can see this because while Diamond's charts
are ranked by units sold, and not dollars, it does offer dollar-ranking
information — but both its dollar rankings and its market shares are
based on wholesale dollars.

But retailers ordered 17% more copies of the Ultimate Spider-Man Omnibus. So the Omnibus
had to be selling for less than a third of what Diamond normally would
have sold the book to retailers for. Thus, while the topline figure for
graphic novel sales was way, way up — up 67% over last December, within
just the Top 300 — the real figure was an increase of 18%.

I've
written about this several times in the past: there's not really
anything to do about it, as running rankings based on wholesale dollars
would tend to be confusing — and the central purpose of this site is
reporting how many copies entered into the Direct Market. It's true that
$10 million in Top 300 graphic novels by cover price were
ordered by retailers in December: if they sold them all at full retail,
the sum would still reflect what the industry made. In any event, take
the category with a grain of salt this month.

Records set during the month:

• Highest dollar volume for Top 300 Trade Paperbacks in a single month: $10.51 million; overstated by the means described above.

• Highest dollar volume for comics and graphic novels ordered in a quarter: $134.79 million, beating the record set last quarter.

• Highest dollar market share for IDW: 8.18%

Additionally,
the combined market shares of IDW, Image, and Dark Horse are higher
than has been seen for the 3-4-5 publishers since 2003. Click to see
other Diamond-era records.

December 2013: $10.51 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +67%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +57%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 50 vs. the Top 50: +66%
Versus 15 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +128%
Q4 2013: $26.22 million, +19% vs. Q4 2012
2013 YEAR END: $93.91 million, +11% vs. 2012

ALL TRADE PAPERBACK SALES
December 2013 versus one year ago this month: +18.02%
Q4 2013 versus Q4 2012: +7.8% YEAR TO DATE: +6.5%

The average comic book in the Top 300 cost $3.66; the average comic book
retailers ordered cost $3.72. The median and most common price for comics offered was $3.99. Click to see comics prices across time.

Retailers ordered $42.22 million in comic books and graphic novels in December, a sum almost identical to that of November. Less than $9,000, or the sales of a single issue of a 400th-place title, separated November and December's orders. But last December was weaker than last November, so the result was an uptick in the year-to-year percentage change: the direct market ordered nearly 6% more dollars worth of comics and graphic novels this December than last December.

Orders for the fourth quarter totaled $134.79 million in comics and graphic novels, more than a million dollars better than the third quarter and an improvement of more than $6 million over the fourth quarter of 2012. Since the third quarter was already a record for the Diamond Exclusive Era, the fourth quarter represents the highest dollar value for a quarter, unadjusted for inflation, since the early 1990s.

The resulting sales for the year came in at around $517.66 million, which as reported earlier this week is an increase of 9% over last year's figure of $474.45 million.

The percentage change statistics:

DOLLARS

UNITS

DECEMBER 2013 VS. NOVEMBER 2013

Comics

0.63%

1.60%

Graphic Novels

-1.40%

3.67%

Total Comics and Graphic Novels

-0.03%

1.76%

DECEMBER 2013 VS. DECEMBER 2012

Comics

1.09%

-3.64%

Graphic Novels

18.02%

20.38%

Total Comics and Graphic Novels

5.93%

-2.07%

YEAR 2013 VS. YEAR 2012

Comics

10.22%

6.70%

Graphic Novels

6.50%

5.12%

Total Comics and Graphic Novels

9.04%

6.58%

FOURTH
QUARTER 2013 VS. THIRD QUARTER 2013

Comics

-0.72%

-2.39%

Graphic Novels

5.79%

2.09%

Total Comics and Graphic Novels

1.23%

-2.06%

FOURTH
QUARTER 2013 VS. FOURTH QUARTER 2012

Comics

4.16%

-0.97%

Graphic Novels

7.80%

9.50%

Total Comics and Graphic Novels

5.28%

-0.22%

IDW had a dollar market share of 8.18%, a record for the publisher; it was good enough to put the company into the third place slot. The previous high for IDW was 7.54%, in April 2013. It's the only time in 2013 IDW placed third; it did so three times each in 2011 and 2012, first doing so in June 2009. See other Diamond-era records here.

The next three publishers after Marvel and DC had 21.78% of the dollar orders: this is the highest total for that sub-grouping since February 2003, when it was 23.47% (with the CrossGen in IDW's place). The market shares for December:

PUBLISHER

UNITS

DOLLARS

Marvel

36.56%

35.42%

DC

31.13%

27.22%

IDW

6.17%

8.18%

Image

8.07%

7.32%

Dark Horse

6.35%

6.28%

Dynamite

3.25%

3.22%

Boom

2.12%

2.06%

Zenescope

1.16%

1.11%

Eaglemoss

0.18%

0.98%

Zenescope

0.91%

0.91%

Other

4.08%

7.32%

Marvel's Origin II #1 was the top-selling comic book, though since it didn't appear in Diamond's year-end top 10, that tells us it wasn't one of the year's bigger blockbusters. Once again, only one comic book in the Top 10 was priced below $3.99. The Top 10 comic books for the month:

COMIC BOOK

PRICE

VENDOR

1

Origin II #1

4.99

Marvel

2

Avengers #24.Now

4.99

Marvel

3

Batman #26

3.99

DC

4

Forever Evil #4

3.99

DC

5

Superman Unchained #5

3.99

DC

6

Justice League #25

3.99

DC

7

Harley Quinn #1

2.99

DC

8

Justice League #26

3.99

DC

9

Inhumanity #1

3.99

Marvel

10

Superior Spider-Man #23

3.99

Marvel

Fables Vol. 19 from DC led the graphic novel charts. The Top 10 graphic novels for the month:

GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COLLECTIONS

PRICE

VENDOR

1

Fables Volume 19: Snow White

16.99

DC

2

Adventure Time Volume 2: Pixel Princesses

11.99

Boom

3

Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground HC

17.99

IDW

4

Deadpool Kills Deadpool

14.99

Marvel

5

Star Lord: Worlds On The Brink

7.99

Marvel

6

Nightwing Volume 3: Death Of The Family

16.99

DC

7

Saga Volume 1

9.99

Image

8

Deadpool Volume 3: Good Bad And Ugly

15.99

Marvel

9

Saga Volume 2

14.99

Image

10

The Walking Dead Volume 1: Days Gone Bye

14.99

Image

Here's the list of how many new titles each major publisher shipped. IDW had 88 items on the shelves, contributing volume to that market share record:

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

In advance of the larger releases of its December and 2013 year-end sales tables, Diamond Comic Distributors has released a sneak peek at the topline figures for the year.

Comic shop orders for comic books and graphic novels in North America reportedly
increased by 9.04% over 2012. It's a smaller increase than last year's 14.72% boost. It would bring the year in at more than
$518 million — in line with previous estimates here at Comichron
— and an increase of around $43 million for the year. Note that this
figure does not include comics and graphic novels sold through
bookstore and newsstand channels, which adds another $200 million or so —
nor does it include digital sales, which were reported to be in excess
of $75 million in 2012 and would likely have been more in 2013.

Orders for comic books were up by 10.22% in dollars, while graphic novel orders were up by 6.5%. October's The Walking Dead #115 was the best-selling comic book of the year, with sales in excess of 300,000 copies — and, perhaps not coincidentally, it cost at least a dollar less than anything else on the top-ten list.

TOP-SELLING COMICS OF 2013

TITLE

PRICE

VENDOR

1

The Walking Dead #115

$2.99

Image

2

Justice League Of America #1

$3.99

DC

3

Superman Unchained #1

$4.99

DC

4

Guardians of the Galaxy #1

$3.99

Marvel

5

Superior Spider-Man #1

$3.99

Marvel

6

Infinity #1

$4.99

Marvel

7

X-Men #1

$3.99

Marvel

8

Age Of Ultron #1

$3.99

Marvel

9

Uncanny X-Men #1

$3.99

Marvel

10

Superman Unchained #2

$3.99

DC

Image also had the top-selling graphic novel in Saga Vol. 1— again, priced quite a bit less than anything else in the Top 10. It unseatedWalking Dead Vol. 1, which had led the list for three years running; that book still placed second. Image had seven out of ten entries on the list.

TOP-SELLING GRAPHIC NOVELS OF 2013

TITLE

PRICE

VENDOR

1

Saga Volume 1

$9.99

Image

2

The Walking Dead Volume 1: Days Gone Bye

$14.99

Image

3

Saga Volume 2

$14.99

Image

4

The Walking Dead Volume 18: What Comes After

$14.99

Image

5

The Walking Dead Volume 2: Miles Behind Us

$14.99

Image

6

The Walking Dead Volume 19: March To War

$14.99

Image

7

Hawkeye Volume 1: My Life As Weapon

$16.99

Marvel

8

Batman Volume 1: The Court Of Owls

$16.99

DC

9

Batman: The Killing Joke Special Edition HC

$17.99

DC

10

The Walking Dead Volume 3: Safety Behind Bars

$14.99

Image

Marvel led the publishers list in both dollar and market shares, and the dollar rankings were identical to 2012's list, with the exception of Valiant replacing Viz at ninth:

UNIT SHARE

DOLLAR SHARE

Marvel Comics

36.97%

33.50%

DC Entertainment

33.35%

30.33%

Image Comics

8.49%

8.00%

IDW Publishing

5.10%

6.47%

Dark Horse Comics

4.50%

5.17%

Dynamite Entertainment

2.59%

2.72%

Boom! Studios

1.92%

1.99%

Eaglemoss Publications

0.26%

1.25%

Valiant Entertainment

1.06%

0.98%

Avatar Press

0.74%

0.89%

Other Non-Top 10

5.02%

8.70%

The monthly reports for 2013 can be found here, and previous years for comparison can be found here.

Comichron is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.